Important information regarding upcoming price changes

As a valued agentOS client, I want to inform you of an upcoming price increase that will take effect on 1st May 2024.  As always, we do not take this decision lightly, and I have carefully considered the 2023 economic climate and its impact on our business.

Why do we need to increase our prices?

Since our last price increase in September 2022, both our businesses and yours have experienced increases in operating costs, including:

• Continued cost of living inflation: the RPI increase for 2023 was 10% (https://www.statista.com/statistics/374890/rpi-rate-forecast-uk/), which has continued driving up the prices of goods and services across the board, including those we rely on to provide you software.
• Energy costs: the continued rise in the first half of 2023 directly impacted our server costs.
• General increases: in business rates, insurances, cyber security (we require this to protect your data) and telecoms have all risen.
• Supplier and service provider price increases: all of our software subscriptions and service providers have increased their cost to us in 2023, such as Microsoft (10%), Amazon (23%) Zendesk (20%), etc. 
• Upcoming minimum wage increase: this affects labour costs.

Unlike some CRMs with mandatory annual price increases, we carefully review costs and their impact before making any decision to change our pricing.  

Hence it is 20 months since our last price increase.

A client contacted me and explained they would never dream of increasing their fees to their landlords and vendors.  I appreciate that agents’ percentage fees do not increase, but we both acknowledged that his percentage fees are of the rent and house values, and the cash paid increases year on year due to inflationary increases of rents and house prices.

As a software and service provider we charge fixed subscription fees rather than a percentage of rent or house values, and that is why we must do a step increase in our prices from time to time.

How are we adding value to offset the price increase?

We are committed to providing our customers with the best possible value for their money. That’s why we are constantly investing in new features and services that can help you grow your business.

Here are just a few examples of how we are adding value for your business:

Continued software releases 

Throughout 2023 we delivered 10 software releases that included 21 new features, 24 improvements, and 55 new automations.

Automations

We continue to dedicate a full time developer to code more custom automations for your business.

In 2023 we set up over 100 automations that are saving agents 1000s of hours in labour costs.

As in any business, automating is critical to do more of what is required of us, without defaulting to needing to employ more people or work longer hours.

Automations are included in your subscription and I encourage you to contact us to set up automations in your agency by emailing support@agentOS.com

Customisations

In 2023 we launched custom fields and API, allowing you to customise the software to your business and connect you to other software systems and services with custom API.

If you are manually sending an email, spreadsheet or logging into another system to share data, then I implore you to consider custom fields and APIs to automate this.

AI Emails

A game changer that reads, summarises and then creates replies to emails, saving you and your team 1000s of hours reading full emails and typing and retyping email responses.  

Our next software development step is automatic AI email replies.  

If you would like to try this, please contact support@agentos.com

New pricing structure

Effective 1st May 2024, our new pricing structure will be as follows:

Starter subscription £110/m (11% increase)

Professional subscription £275/m (10% increase)

Additional users £52.50 per user (7% increase)

API connections £16.50/m (14% increase)

Your subscription includes:

• Automations
• Customisations
• Power reports
• Online brochures
• AI emails
• Apple and Google TenantApp (Coming Very Soon)
• Open banking
• negApp
• accountsApp
• contractorApp
• Website tenancy application plugin
• Website maintenance reporting plugin
• Continued software & API releases

Final thoughts 

In my business we regularly revisit the software we use to see what new features, technologies, or services we were not benefiting from.   

I urge you to chat with the client success team about growth and profit features like automations, customisations, the online brochure, open banking, Calmony client accounts (provided by Griffin.Bank and compliant to CMP regulations) and built in BACS system (no need for your bank’s expensive BACS service).

They are all there for you to benefit from.

I do not take for granted that you have chosen us to provide a critical service for your business and we are driven to develop more that builds success for you.

Thank you for your continued partnership.

Glyn Trott

Note: data hosting subscriptions will increase to £110 per branch per month due to the increased data security expenses and insurance requirements.